December 4, 2007
Program Preview:
John Patrick and the Future of the Internet

As it has been our pleasure for several consecutive years, we welcome the return of John Patrick at our December General Meeting. John will bring us a leading edge look at the Internet frontier. He will help us sort out the fads from the more fundamental shifts in content and lifestyle made possible by the ubiquitous web.

John Patrick is President of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for thirty-eight years. During his IBM career John helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive for the launch of the IBM ThinkPad brand. Starting in the early 1990s, John dedicated his time to fostering Internet technologies. One of the leading Internet visionaries, John is quoted frequently in the global media and speaks at dozens of conferences around the world. Business 2.0 named him as one of the industry's most intriguing minds, Industry Week named him one of the top 30 people who drive innovation and provide the initial spark to economic growth, and Network World called him one of the 25 most powerful people in networking.

John was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994, a founding member and past chairman of the Global Internet Project, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Internet Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a member of the Engineering Advisory Board at Lehigh University. John has been a business and technology advisor to numerous companies. He is a member of the board of directors of Opera Software ASA, Jupitermedia Corporation, Knovel Corporation and our own Danbury Health Systems, Inc. His book, Net Attitude, paints a vivid picture of the future of the Internet and the attitudes needed to capitalize on it.

It will be an evening to be entertained, informed and gain an insight into where the Internet is going over the next several years. Also, bring your questions for John since there will be time to get them all answered.

Here are a few things that we can do to prepare for the meeting:

1. Spend some time visiting John’s blog, patrickWeb. His latest entry, as of the writing of this preview, is called BioEverything, which discusses how prominent bio-related courses have become in the engineering curriculum. For those of you who have expressed interest in the field of biometrics, John has a post on that topic. iPhone is the subject of several posts, and there is one about a Demo Conference John attended in September. And there are over 800 other postings to pick from.

2. Ask yourself a few questions about how your own Web activities have changed:

• In how many ways does the Internet play a role in your life now compared to a year ago?
• How many email addresses do you use now compared to a year ago?
• Do you have a blog or read any?
• Do you shop online more or less than a year ago?
• Do you bank online?
• What are some of the websites that you have tried out for the first time this year that you continue to use or visit? Or, for which you have RSS feeds?
• Do you participate in or contribute to any interactive Web 2.0 sites?
• If you spend more time online now than a year ago, how do you spend less time?

3. Think about what areas of your life could be affected by the way the Internet shapes up.

• What if newspapers almost disappear, have you found sources of news and opinions online that you trust and rely on?
• Would you consider freezing your Credit Report to prevent online identity fraud?
• Are you ready to have your medical records stored in a facility like Microsoft’s HealthVault? (See Jim Scheef’s November 2007 Circuit Rider.) If not there, what is a good way to ask for suitable online medical record storage facilities?
• Is there any online source that could influence your voting decisions? Would you feel heard if you answered a politician’s question on a forum like Yahoo Answers?

DACS meetings are held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. (Click here for directions.) Activities begin at 6:30 p.m. with registration and casual networking. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. with a discussion of what’s new in technology (What's News) followed by a general question and answer period (Ask DACS), announcements and a short break. The featured evening presentation begins at 8:00.

As a reminder, our General Meetings are free and open to the public so invite anyone you know who would be interested in this topic.